The Science of Well-Being

April 26, 2020April 26, 2020Goal Setting The Science of Well-Being

Creating Habits to Improve Happiness

The last several posts have discussed concrete strategies to improve happiness. Now we will talk about creating habits. Here is a list of all 9 proven strategies, followed by how to be successful with these strategies and improve happiness by creating habits. Proven Strategies to Improve Happiness Spend more money on experiences vs. “things” Practice and Express Gratitude Reset your Reference Points, don’t compare yourself to unrealistic expectations Use your character strengths, including finding a job and activities that allow you to use these strengths Perform Random Acts of Kindness Increase your Social Connection Increase your Time Spent Exercising and …

April 25, 2020April 25, 2020The Science of Well-Being

Mindset to Improve Happiness

One of the more difficult things in modern society is our ability to control our minds. We tend to have minds that do not stick on the task at hand. Our minds are all over the place. Is it possible to control our mindset to improve happiness? Mind-wandering Mind-wandering is a phenomenon in which we shift the contents of our thoughts away from whatever task we have going on, shifting them to the external environment. 46.9% of the time we are not thinking about the things in the here and now. Almost half of the time we are not focused …

April 24, 2020April 24, 2020The Science of Well-Being

Prioritizing Time to Improve Happiness

We are continuing on with the same theme as the last few posts; what are concrete ways to improve our happiness. And prioritizing time over money to improve happiness is another strategy. Affluence Affluence is an abundant flow or supply. For example, many people have an affluence of toilet paper right now. Most people think of monetary affluence. Someone who is very rich and is standing in a pile of money. But there is a second kind of affluence. One that is usually at odds with monetary affluence. That is time affluence. Time Affluence Imagine having all of the time …

April 24, 2020April 23, 2020Exercise The Science of Well-Being

Happy Medicine

Are you interested in finding out more about “Happy Medicine“? Something that you could start right now to become happier? Something that will continue to make you happy for the rest of your life? Do you want to love your body more? Have more mental clarity? Live longer? Combat chronic pain? Improve diabetes and heart disease? Stop obesity and other life-style related disease? Would you believe this “Happy Medicine” has no side effects, is legal, and that it can be free? What is this happy medicine? I introduce to you….. Exercise! Yes, it makes you happier. It is a “happy …

April 21, 2020April 21, 2020The Science of Well-Being

Social Connection Makes us Happier

So far we have learned that acts of kindness, using our character strengths, having gratitude, savoring, and spending money on experiences vs “things”, are all strategies that can boost our happiness. To add to this growing list, social connection makes us happier than we typically believe. Want to start at the beginning of this journey? Click here. Social Connection Connectedness matters much more than we might think. Honestly, given this pandemic, we may be realizing this much more than normal. I hope we remember what we have learned during this time. David Myers looked at this idea of social connection …

April 21, 2020April 21, 2020The Science of Well-Being

Using Kindness to Improve Happiness

We saw, in our first post dedicated to The Science of Well-Being, that the things we think will make us happier, actually don’t. And maybe this is true because we are miswanting a bunch of things in our life. How do we begin to genuinely identify the thing that will truly make us happier in the long term. And how do we know what things we are actually supposed to want? One way is through the act being kind. Today we are going to discuss using kindness to improve happiness. Kindness We should be seeking out more opportunities to act …

April 19, 2020April 19, 2020The Science of Well-Being

Using Your Strengths to Improve Happiness

What are the things we should be wanting, but don’t currently want? How can we want the stuff that’s really going to make us happy? Today we will be discussing, wanting the right parts of the things we already do want and using our signature strengths to improve our happiness. We will use our jobs as an example as this is easy to grasp. We have talked about things about our jobs that we think bring happiness; higher and higher salaries. But we have learned that this is not actually true, even though we don’t realize it. So if the …

April 18, 2020April 18, 2020The Science of Well-Being

Reset Your Reference Points

How do we get over the annoying feature of our mind that decides to judge ourselves against relative versus absolute reference points? Please read this post if you feel confused about reference points! Let’s talk about how to reset your reference points to help you become genuinely happier. Reference Points Quick reminder, this annoying feature of our mind is the one that compares ourselves, our successes, our dreams, against others and not against what we care about or seek internally. These reference points are affecting our happiness levels, without us even realizing it. We use other people’s lives, social media, …

April 17, 2020April 17, 2020The Science of Well-Being

Curb Hedonic Adaptation

Let’s continue with putting in the work on reframing our thinking on what makes us happier. Last post we started with learning how to Rethink “Awesome Stuff”. Today we will discuss how to Curb Hedonic Adaptation. Refresher Hedonic adaptation is the tendency of humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major recent positive or negative events or life changes. Read more about this here. Seems simple enough. If we become intentional with our investments we will see that experiences do make us happier. Plus, we avoid adaptation to happiness, as experiences are short lived. But what …

April 18, 2020April 15, 2020The Science of Well-Being

Rethink “Awesome Stuff”

Let’s start to put in concrete work on reframing our thinking on what makes us happier. Starting with learning how to Rethink “Awesome Stuff”. Review up to this point: Happiness cannot be learned, we need to put habits into place, we need to take action. Misconceptions- Most things we think will make us happy actually don’t. Miswanting- Mistaking how much you will like something in the future. Reference points- We compare ourselves to relative vs absolute reference points. Adaptation- We adapt to things that make us happy, and they start making us less happy over time. Mispredicting- We don’t realize …